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31 May 2009

With the long-term existence of the printed book in jeopardy, and as I find my own time and brain increasingly torn between books and electronic media (blogs, news, email, video, etc.), I am thinking a lot these days about what it means to read books. More specifically, what it means to be a person who reads books.

A commenter on this blog made the very good point a few weeks ago that a physical book is not connected. Meaning, when you are holding a book in your hands and reading it, you are not receiving message pop-ups, or seeing links to buy this or click over to that, or tempted to “open new tab” to check in on Facebook, or work email, or news headlines. Even if, say, you are reading on your Kindle, and you click away to download a book that came to mind as you were in mid-read, you are interrupting your reading, you are not fully engaged.

Reading a book — a literary book, let’s say, fiction or nonfiction — is a kind of commitment, and is about singular attention; it is decidedly not multitasking; it is an experience both particular and unsimulatable. And, if the book you are reading is worth anything, something happens to you, the quality of your humanness changes, as a result.

Reading a book engages intellect, emotion, imagination. No other kind of reading engages all these, firing on all cylinders, in that same sustained way. Reading a book is a descending into a place of complex thought and feeling, a kind of departure from the world of surfaces as a way of seeing and understanding more deeply what those surfaces reflect.

A person who reads books is different from a person who does not read books. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that a person who reads books is morally or intellectually superior to a person who doesn’t; but qualitatively, these are different kinds of people. There is a part of me that might venture to say that this difference is just as, if not more, significant than any race, class, gender, or geographical signifiers.

Although, to be sure, the baseline assumption here is that we are talking about literate people, i.e. people who can read books but choose one way or the other. What is clear to me, and somewhat surprising, is how many people who can read books do not read books.

It’s a half-baked thought, which I hope to come back to. All I know is that, these days, when I meet a new person, or I’m trying to get a feel for a person, or I’m having a conflict of world view with a person, one of the first things I’ll wonder is: does this person read books? Because I have this inarticulate feeling that somehow it’s all there, in the answer to that question.

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27 May 2009

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed a few sidewise digs at the Stephanie Meyers Twilight series. Writer-to-writer digs are unbecoming (as evidenced by the recent Oxford chairship ugliness), especially sidewise ones. So I’ve been meaning to write about Twilight straight on.

In writing classes, a cardinal rule is to start with positive comments when critiquing. So let me say that I’ve been to Forks, WA, and it’s a lovely place.

Ok, seriously. My Twilight problems began when I took on a group of undergraduates, almost all young women, in a fiction class. When asked what they like to read/are currently reading in fiction, most cited the Twilight books. Most cited only the Twilight books.

Naively, I gave the students free reign on what to write for their first round of short stories. The first few came back as vampire and/or young-love stories. During the mid-class break (it was a 3-hour weekly session), I heard a few students congratulate the writers on how much the stories reminded them of such-and-such scene or character from Twilight, or, alternatively, how smartly the writer had both simulated and departed from Twilight. Clearly, Twilight was hovering and echoing in these students’ imaginations.

The basic weaknesses of these first stories were as follows: repetitive/unimaginative language, cliche descriptions, flat (too-perfect) young male characters.

So even though I’d never read Stephanie Meyers’ books, I immediately developed a prejudice against them. I felt I had read them.

My prejudice became a little too apparent in class. And when I confessed I’d never read the books, my students — justifiably — called me out on it. So. I asked one of the most enthusiastic Twilight advocates to bring in for us her favorite chapter, so that we could all read and discuss the quality of the writing, since that’s what we were there to study. She happily agreed.

We had our discussion during our last class — after 15 weeks of studying and writing and workshopping. We’d learned about characterization, language, plot, point-of-view, and dialogue. In their peer critiques, the students had begun writing comments like “cliche!” in the margins, and were recognizing where characters were not credible, dialogue sounded forced, language too vague, plot arc too flat. They were “showing, not telling” me their characters much more in their stories and exercises. They were reading and discussing Chekhov, Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison.

But we also talked about the brilliant premise of the series — sexual tension, in a nutshell (the more the handsome vampire loves the girl the more he both wants to bite her and struggles to resist biting her – talk about conflict and rising action!). And in the end, the students decided that the books are highly entertaining and emotionally absorbing; just not terribly well-written.

(For the record, the one male in the class hated the excerpt.)

So there you have it. Life is hard sometimes, entertainment lightens the load. That said, there’s no reason why art and entertainment should be mutually exclusive. Looking for a salacious page-turning romance teeming with sexual tension? Try Henry James, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy. No kidding, you won’t be disappointed.

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26 May 2009

Welcome to summer! I don’t know about you, but we grilled us some corn-on- the-cob over the weekend. So it’s only fitting to blog today about Hyperion’s new “e-imprint” Kernl. Kernls are described as “short packages of text combined with video and interactive components.”

Err? Yeah — me perplexed too. Clearly these are not books.

What are they? Well, it seems they might ultimately evolve into book-like substances. The words “incubation” and “full-length” are used in the article.

Kernl will also eventually seek advertising. This is the part that makes my face squinch up. A publisher (of books) adjusting to the new market reality by turning books into something which can be advertiser-sponsored. More likely, turning increasingly away from the production of print books, and toward the delivery of multi-media “packages.” Perhaps no surprise, since Hyperion is a division of ABC TV/Disney Media Networks.

I am no economics guru, but I think we learned about this in high school when we studied industrialization and the rise of big business. A little something called vertical integration? Any business-minded folk among you, with perspectives more sophisticated than my 1980s history textbook, please chime in and enlighten.

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22 May 2009

…if you poke around a little on a regular basis.

From a post at RobAroundBooks, a book jacket I am guessing I would have otherwise never seen — for a novel by a Korean writer (I’ve never heard of), published by Telegram, an indie publisher in London (that I’ve also never heard of).

Again, it’s all Latin to me. From what I can gather, Apple’s involvement in e-reading is significant (you can read any Kindle book on an iphone now), as is Barnes & Noble’s acquisition of a major e-book retailer and plans to launch their own e-reading platform in the fall. In other words, Amazon is not — will not remain — the only e-book retailing game in town.

But with hard cover books selling generally in the $20-$30 range, and all e-books selling for $9.99 on Amazon, both publishers and authors do worry: if e-book retailers begin driving down the magic number of what they’ll pay a publisher for content, then publishers’ profit margins drop even further; and authors, well… our dregs get even dreggier, if we’re able to publish our low-profit-margin literary works at all.

I may be getting this pyramid structure all wrong; but the part about authors being at the bottom seems about right.

Everything seems to be pointing to the literary mid-list (by which I mean all non-best-sellers) becoming primarily a nonprofit and self-publishing endeavor. Perhaps some good can come of this — the proliferation of literary collectives, the birth of more nonprofit small presses? What I would hate to see is the disproportionate death of the physical book for the literary genre; it feels, somehow, like if you had to choose, you should be able to get Twilight electronically, but EL Doctorow in hard cover.

But that would assume an impossible world where I make the bottom-line decisions. Moo-hoo-haa-haaa-haaaaaaa……..

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17 May 2009

The book jacket for Long for This World is done. Galleys next month. Exciting? Wish I could say yes. It’s strange when things become “final.” In every other part of life, completion feels good. With creative work, there’s a tinge of melancholy. Post-partum?

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14 May 2009

An interesting blog post from novelist David Francis about the dubious considerations of literary “success” in a publishing environment that is less and less interested in building up a writer’s career/readership slowly, over time. “You wrote a hit,” the agent might say, “so now give us more of the same. That’s what your readers want.” Francis admirably resists. No, “admirably” isn’t quite right; he resists because there is no other choice. A literary writer only writes well when he writes from the gut — inductively, not deductively. Francis writes:

I’ll honor that desire to lay out the lines of words as they appear, as Annie Dillard suggests, securing a sentence before building on it, allowing it to grow “cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop.” That still feels right to me, to let it be what it becomes.